Moving on and forgetting

IN THE movie “Rabbit Hole,” the character Becca who lost a son to an accident, asks her mother (who also experienced the same) about pain and coping. “Does it ever go away?” she asks.

“No,” says the mom, “I don't think it does. Not for me, it hasn't— has gone on for eleven years. But it changes though.”

“How?” asks Becca. “I don't know,” says the mother, “the weight of it, I guess. At some point, it becomes bearable. It turns into something that you can crawl out from under and… carry around like a brick in your pocket. And you… you even forget it, for a while. But then you reach in for whatever reason and—there it is. Oh right, that. Which could be awful—not all the time. It's kinda… not that you'd like it exactly, but it's what you've got instead of your son. So, you carry it around. And uh… it doesn't go away. Which is…”

“Which is what?” asks Becca. “Fine, actually,” says the mom.

Now, to tangible life: History's recent photograph has, from left, former presidents Joseph Estrada, Gloria Arroyo, Fidel Ramos and Benigno Aquino—President Rodrigo Duterte at the center—in one frame.

A thousand words there, yes, and you find some pretty much in the President's Sona: “We cannot move forward if we allow the past to pull us back. Finger-pointing is not the way. That is why I will not waste precious time dwelling on the sins of the past or blaming those who are perceived to be responsible for the mess that we are in and suffering from.”

The overarching message about where the President wants to ground everything else in his administration boils down, I think, to two things: moving on and forgetting.

The five-president tableaux illustrates just that, and it is not as though the President does not acknowledge the pain of forgetting. Quickly, in the Sona, he said: “Sorrow cuts across every stratum of society. It cuts deeply and the pain lasts forever.”

There is something in the body language of everyone in that photo op that mirrors each and every Filipino's discomfort in having to forgive those one thinks caused our national miseries.

So what exactly does moving on mean to the Filipinos in the time of Duterte? Is it like having to reconcile with the missteps of the past, like befriending a mistress or a first wife, having the two families on breakfast table? Is it giving closure to Martial Law, to Yolanda, to Hello Garci? Tabula rasa here, let's fix this jigsaw called the Filipino?

Ernest Renan, the 19th century French historian said, “Forgetting, and I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.” That would be Renan's reply to George Santayana's “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But Kurt Vonnegut was quick to respond, “I've got news for Mr. Santayana: We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.”

Alive, in fact with much zeal, the Philippines is doomed to repeat the past? What's here to repeat? Extrajudicial killings?

Journalist David Rieff tackles, rather radically, in his book “In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies” the rewards of forgetting. Memory, he says, is problematic— societies remember that version of the past that serves the present. And dwelling in the past has only perpetuated the old wars and had not brought lasting peace to nations. On the other hand, forgetting, by which he means acceptance, creates the prospects of reconciliation and eventual peace. Forgetting, Rieff says, “does an injustice to the past, (but) remembering does an injustice to the present.”

It's the hardest thing to do. You look at the unflinching eye of Bongbong Marcos and you're thrown back to the regime's days. From a whole slew of political persuasions, you see a specific corner in that historic photograph of ex-presidents and seethe with contempt.

So, you see, no one is spared from the difficulty of moving on. But at no other time in history that one call for forgetting is made by one president who, at once intelligent but enigmatic, may be serious about it.

Maybe bet on this one for the benefit of the doubt.